Physically disabled persons often require assistance in using bathroom facilities such as the toilet and the shower. There is a variety of equipment available to assist with such bathroom needs. One class of such equipment is toilet chairs, which have a padded toilet seat. The chairs can roll over a standard toilet so that the person can use the toilet without having to be moved from the chair. These chairs can also be wheeled into showers which are made wheelchair-accessible. However, as most showers, both in the home and in institutions such as hotels, are not wheelchair accessible, very expensive retrofitting of the shower facilities is required in order to allow a wheelchair to be wheeled into the shower.
There is also apparatus available specifically to assist in the use of shower facilities. Bathtub lifts are expensive to install and have only one use. There are also many different types of transfer benches which have an extension which extends to the edge of, or outside of, a bathtub, so that a person can be seated on the extension and then slid over onto the seat which is in the tub. One example of such an apparatus is the "Tubby II Tub Transfer Chair" available from Activeaid, Inc., Redwood Falls, Minn. Improvements to such transfer chairs are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,758,894, issued to Mary Finley on Sep. 18, 1973, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,253,203, issued on Mar. 3, 1981, to Morton Thomas. Both patents disclose transfer benches with seats or seat portions which slide along parallel rods to assist in transferring the person from outside of the tub into the tub. Even these solutions, however, require that the person be assisted, or lifted, from the wheelchair onto the transfer bench in order to take the shower, and then lifted back into the wheelchair once the shower has been completed. Accordingly, quite a bit of assistance is still required.